HeyTaco Tips & Tricks as shared by HeyTaco Admins

I recently hosted a meetup of HeyTaco admins to share some fun tips, habits and tricks we have seen customers do with HeyTaco. If you want to watch a full recording of the meetup, you can check it out here (and subscribe to our YouTube channel if you'd like; it's where we post all videos related to HeyTaco). 

However, the most fun part of the meetup was the group chat that was buzzing with questions and answers with ideas that blew my mind! There are so many fun things teams around the world to build and strengthen their culture using HeyTaco, and every time I meet with our customers, I learn something new. This meetup was no exception. 

The most common questions people had entering the meetup were related to reward ideas (especially non-monetary), the value of a taco and engagement ideas for creating more fun and activity with HeyTaco. Below are some of the tips your fellow HeyTaco admins have shared that have been working well for their teams. I have to say, my favorite was the reward idea of 'pie a manager.' Whoever thought of that deserves a taco! 🌮

Reward tips

• Redeeming for cinema tickets works so well for us!
• We have a Coffee for a Coworker reward that allows remote workers to recognize each other with their rewards
• Some of our items in our taco shop:  branded swag, gift cards (lunch, coffee, etc), exchange of an office day for a remote day, visit to our corporate office, Taco Tuesday lunch for your team.
• We set a taco reward for pieing management in the face, they loved it. By far had our highest level of donations.
• We’re a hospitality group and work with our suppliers to sponsor rewards. Keeps it fresh and very cheap for us too.
• We do a ‘gift your tacos to team member’ reward. This has been heavily used recently as well as the charity donations.
• We've seen a lot of success with our stipends. We give stipends in quantities of $100 for various things like "Self Care", "In Home Cleaner", "Home Office Makeover" or "Adventure Time". And it allows for our global employees to have the same experience.
• We do summon a food truck or catering onsite… We also do company merch.
• Buying a coworker a coffee gift card and including a note of why they are being recognized.
• We have a free reward of a "crisp high 5" in addition to our regular rewards and that always makes people laugh.
• We have a call support aspect of our role - and we have "go off phones" for a half day to focus on projects without distraction.
• We do collectable pins with funny messages related to our business like: ‘Everything is under Ctrl’
• We had a "Taco 'bout it" T shirt a while back for our Taco Shop.
• We have a redemption to give someone else your assignment (so if a writer wants to give away an article to someone else).
• We have a redemption for a surprise doordash lunch.
• We ‘donate’ our ‘dead tacos’ (tacos earned but team members have left the company) to charity :)
• Our team is all remote, global. So, we have a Gift Card reward so we can kinda change as needed. We let people redeem tacos to GIVE more tacos… up to 20 per day.
• We had a 50% off rewards day — it  was nuts! (Especially useful when you have a hard time encouraging people to redeem their tacos)

Taco Exchange Rate

• Our taco value equates to about .25 cents. Ie. 100 tacos
• 100 tacos = about $25 gift card

Driving Engagement

• We created emojis of our values in Slack. We encourage givers and others to react with value emojis.
• We have a taco trophy we had custom made that we give each week to our top taco winner.
• We give a gift card to our top giver of the month.
• We award the highest taco giver of the month with a $25 gift card to a place of their choice. Employees can only win that once a year.
• Every Tuesday (Taco Tuesday), we give 25 bonus tacos to our top 3 givers from the previous week.
• We do taco shoutouts in our weekly full staff meeting.
• We highlight our top receiver in our biweekly company meetings and have their manager share a specific example of something awesome they did.
• We do taco bonuses for work anniversaries — 100 tacos X years on team.
• We have used hashtags for our core values and awarded the top receivers in company meetings along with a short spotlight of how they are living our values.
• We added a tag for a quarter that was focused on a specific new product launch, so that employees could highlight great efforts towards that launch (often incorporated a core value but helpful for an extra spotlight and encouragement)
• We allow 5 tacos a day and then increase to 10 during our 'busy months' twice a year.
• One thing we've found very helpful is a "wins" channel where people can just say thank you to a team member or post something awesome that happened to them and then people throw tacos out for positive vibes.
• We do HeyTaco only on its own channel so everyone across teams can see all the great things going on.
• We have each department 'shout out' an employee in our monthly meeting and the shout out receiver gets 50 tacos.
• We have a taco channel called #Taco_Party where all of our taco stuff goes.
• Our channel is the #taqueria and the whole team is in thereI have found that once someone gets the taco train going, it starts the party.

Product insights

There were a few relatively new features that people were excited to learn about, such as:

• Ability to give Stickers directly in Slack 
• Adjusting the daily taco limit
• Using Taco Tags (###) to connect taco giving to company values.

Tacos! 

Tacos to all the HeyTaco admins that joined the meetup, and to all of those that wish they could have joined. I am still buzzing with energy from getting to hear all the awesome ways people are building their teams and culture using HeyTaco. As always, if you have feedback or feature ideas, you know how to find me. 

Cheers!